Professor Hardt is a graduate of Lafayette College (BSME, 1972) and MIT (SM, PhD, 1978). He has been a member of the Mechanical Engineering faculty at MIT since 1979. His disciplinary focus is system dynamics and control as applied to manufacturing. His research has been on flexible automation, and process control, with an historical emphasis on welding and forming processes, and a current focus on polymer micro embossing. In welding, he pioneered the use of multivariable control techniques for modeling and control of GMAW, and demonstrated the use of adaptive control in these systems. In the forming processes, he concentrated on the use of in-process measurements and real-time modeling to reduce sensitivity to machine and material variations, and has developed a flexible tooling and closed loop shape control that has implemented in the aerospace industry with specific uses for repair part manufacture. His more recent work has been in the hot micro-embossing process for micro-fluidic device manufacture and scale-up of soft lithography methods using roll to roll processes. In both cases the theme of the work is novel equipment design and overall equipment and process statistical control Prof. Hardt has taught classes in both Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing, and has led the creation of a new graduate degree: Master of Engineering in Manufacturing" at MIT. This is the first professional degree offered by the ME Department at MIT, and is the culmination of many years of course and curriculum development. Prof. Hardt served as Director of the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing from 1985 - 1992 and as Engineering Co-Director for the MIT Leaders for Manufacturing Program from 1993 to 1998. From 1999 to 2011 he was the MIT Chair of the Singapore MIT Alliance (SMA) Program: "Manufacturing Systems and Technology", a research and teaching collaboration with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He was a member of the MIT Commission on Productivity in an Innovation Economy, and served on the Workforce team on the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership program (AMP 1.0).

Stanley B. Gershwin is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. He received the B.S. degree in Engineering Mathematics from Columbia University, New York, New York, in 1966; and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1967 and 1971. In 1970-71, he was employed by the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, where he studied telephone hardware capacity estimation. At the C. S. Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1971-75, he investigated problems in manufacturing and in transportation. He worked in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) during 1975-1987. He was Professor of Manufacturing Engineering at the Boston University College of Engineering (half time) in 1986-1987. Dr. Gershwin currently teaches an MIT course in Manufacturing Systems Analysis (2.852). He has been a member of the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity since 1988. Dr. Gershwin is the author of Manufacturing Systems Engineering (Prentice-Hall, 1994) and numerous papers in international journals. The Institute of Industrial Engineers has given two awards for his paper "Design and Operation of Manufacturing Systems --- The Control-Point Policy,'' (IIE Transactions, Volume 32, Number 2, pp. 891-906, October, 2000) the Best Paper Award for the IIE Transactions focus issues on Design and Manufacturing for 2000-2001, and the Outstanding IIE Publication Award for 2000-2001. An article has appeared in IIE Solutions on Dr. Gershwin and these awards. The Institute of Industrial Engineers has selected "Information inaccuracy in inventory systems: stock loss and stockout," (IIE Transactions, Volume 37, Number 9, September 2005, pp. 843­859) by Yun Kang and Stanley B. Gershwin for the Best Paper of the Year in IIE Transactions on Design & Manufacturing. His research interests include real-time scheduling and planning in manufacturing systems; hierarchical control; dynamic programming in hybrid (discrete and continuous state) systems; decomposition methods for large scale systems; approximation techniques. His major research goal is the development of an engineering theory of manufacturing systems control. Dr. Gershwin and his students have performed research projects and consulted for such companies as Boeing, General Motors, Polaroid, Hewlett Packard, Johnson & Johnson, United Technologies, and others. Dr. Gershwin is a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, the Operations Research Society of America, the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He has been an Associate Editor of several international journals, including International Journal of Production Research, Operations Research, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and others. Dr. Gershwin was an IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer and is a Fellow of the IEEE. Dr. Gershwin is affiliated with MIT's Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, Leaders for Manufacturing Program , and the Operations Research Center.